MIAMI, Oct 25: Southern Florida was reeling on Tuesday after enduring a four-hour assault by Hurricane Wilma that killed at least four people, cut power to millions of homes and caused billions of dollars in damage.

The storm smashed into the state on Monday as a surprisingly strong Category 3 hurricane with 125mph (200kph) winds, having fed on the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico after killing 17 people in a rampage through the Caribbean.

Wilma flooded the low-lying Florida Keys, then hit the mainland south of the fast-growing retirement city of Naples and sped across the Everglades to the populous Miami-Fort Lauderdale area on the Atlantic Coast, blasting windows out of high-rise buildings, destroying mobile homes and flipping cars.

Forecasters said Wilma was the strongest storm to hit the Miami area since August 1992, when Hurricane Andrew caused more than $25 billion in damage. It was the eighth hurricane to strike Florida in 15 months.

Monica Rivadeneira, 34, retreated to a closet when Wilma’s winds whipped concrete blocks against her Miami Beach apartment building. “I took a book and a light and my cell phone and I called everybody I knew from the closet,” she said.

“It was wild. The wind was howling.”

Miami International Airport suffered damage likely to keep it closed for several days.

Wilma’s power stunned thousands who had ignored orders to evacuate the Florida Keys.

It pushed a wall of seawater about 8 feet (2.4 metres) above normal tides into the island chain off mainland Florida’s southern tip, dumping thigh-high water in the streets of Key West, the tourist town made famous by writer Ernest Hemingway.

The town, home to 25,000 people, may have sustained $100 million in damage, City Manager Julio Avael said. “We have hundreds of homes under water, thousands of vehicles damaged, and we need to place residents in shelters,” he said.

The storm forced the postponement of Key West’s annual Fantasy Fest, an annual Halloween costume festival that draws thousands of visitors and had been due to start on Wednesday.

At 0900 GMT on Tuesday, Wilma’s maximum sustained winds had fallen to 115 mph (185 kph) as the storm sped northeast over the Atlantic at 53 mph (85 kph), the US National Hurricane Center said. The storm was expected to weaker further and lose its tropical characteristics during the next 24 hours.

Wilma was expected to pass a few hundred miles southeast and east of North Carolina’s Outer Banks by Tuesday morning and possibly reach the Canadian Maritimes by late Tuesday or early on Wednesday.

The storm was expected to stay well offshore the Northeastern United States, but a combination of weather systems was expected to bring high winds, heavy rain and even snow to parts of the US Northeast, forecasters said.—Reuters